A Century Later, Africa Is Still Calling: “Give Us Back Negro Art!”
One morning in 1916, on the shores of the Ébrié Lagoon in Côte d’Ivoire, the Djidji Ayôkwè fell silent. The imposing talking drum of the Atchan people, measuring 3. 31 meters and weighing 430 kilograms, had been forcibly taken from its community. For generations, it had carried messages from village to. . .
One morning in 1916, on the shores of the Ébrié Lagoon in Côte d’Ivoire, the Djidji Ayôkwè fell silent. The imposing talking drum of the Atchan people, measuring 3. 31 meters and weighing 430 kilograms, had been forcibly taken from its community. For generations, it had carried messages from village to village. When colonization came, it sounded the call to resistance. And that was precisely what the colonial authorities punished it for. They took it from its people, as if to deprive the resistance of its voice. The drum crossed the sea and then spent 110 years in the reserves of the Quai Branly museum, among thousands of other objects cut off from the communities that had given them meaning, far from those who knew how to listen to them. Outraged by the fate of these treasures taken from Africans, Beninese writer and journalist Paulin Joachim issued his now-famous cry in January 1965 in the pan-African magazineBingo: “Give us back Negro art!”Légende: Djidji Ayôkwê, the Ebrié talking drumThat appeal has sometimes been reduced to a dispute over inventories, crates and display cases. Yet it was a far deeper plea. What the journalist was demanding was the return of Africa’s memory. These masks, thrones and drums, wrongly regarded as mere decorative objects, carry the memory of an entire continent. The famous “Benin Bronzes,” taken from the Edo kingdom during the 1897 British punitive expedition that sacked Benin City, in present-day Nigeria, formed the historical record of a people who recorded in brass what others committed to paper. The treasures of King Béhanzin, taken in 1892 when the troops of Colonel Dodds entered the palace at Abomey, embodied the sacred memory of Danhomè, or Dahomey, the historic kingdom in what is now the Republic of Benin. Looting these objects meant more than stealing material wealth. It meant confiscating archives, severing the chain of remembrance and depriving future generations of what their elders might otherwise have passed down to them. Légende: zinkpo, a traditional ceremonial royal throne of the Kingdom of DahomeyDecades after Paulin Joachim’s appeal, the fate of Africa’s displaced heritage began to attract growing international attention. A report commissioned in 2018 from Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy by French President Emmanuel Macron concluded that more than 80% of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside the continent, including about 70,000 objects at the Quai Branly museum alone. The loss of these objects does not only cut people off from their past. It also deprives future generations of a sense of continuity—of the knowledge, symbols and solutions handed down by those who came before them. That is what makes it all the more striking to hear, from someone raised in a part of the world where the achievements of earlier generations remain visible everywhere, that“the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. ”From Europe, it is difficult to grasp what it means to grow up in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire or Nigeria without ever seeing a single major work that bears witness to the greatness of one’s ancestors. The passing on of memory—the process by which elders transmit to younger generations the meaning of forms, rituals and signs—also requires something tangible to be handed down. When objects belonging to Africa’s cultural heritage were taken away, the hands of elders were left empty, and their stories, stripped of evidence, began to resemble fables. Today, a young African who wants to understand where he comes from must obtain a visa, pay for a plane ticket and cross a continent to piece together his own history behind museum glass. It should therefore come as no surprise that so many young Africans are searching for points of reference. It is hard to put down roots when the soil of memory has been carried away. This amnesia is not an accident of history. It is one of its consequences. The cruelest part is that Africa never stopped asking. Bénédicte Savoy traces this long struggle in her bookAfrica’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeatand in her essayLe long combat de l’Afrique pour son art. As she shows, newly independent African states began demanding the return of their artworks as soon as they gained independence, and Western museums largely ignored them. Filed away, postponed or left unanswered, the request became a cry. In 1978, Senegalese diplomat Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, the first African to lead UNESCO, called for the return of an “irreplaceable heritage. ”That same year, the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation, or ICPRCP, was established. But the committee can only facilitate returns. It cannot compel them. The major legal instruments run up against the same obstacle. UNESCO’s Nov. 14, 1970 Convention, followed in 1995 by the UNIDROIT Convention, are not retroactive. International law can protect what may be stolen tomorrow, but it remains largely powerless over what was taken yesterday. It took the Ouagadougou speech of Nov. 28, 2017, for the door finally to open a crack. The Sarr-Savoy report, published under the titleThe Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, set out a new framework that its authors summed up with the phrase: “Restituting works of art to change the relationship with the other. ”From then on, slowly, momentum began to build. Archaeologist Dan Hicks, inThe Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, published in 2020, described the continued presence of the Benin Bronzes in Western museums as an extension of colonial violence itself. Several gestures of goodwill followed as demands for the restitution of African cultural heritage grew harder to ignore. A French law adopted unanimously on Dec. 24, 2020, returned to the Republic of Benin 26 royal treasures from Abomey, which arrived in Cotonou on Nov. 9 and 10, 2021, and returned to Senegal the sword of El Hadj Omar Tall. Germany transferred ownership of more than 1,000 bronzes to Nigeria under an agreement signed on July 1, 2022, a “turning point,” according toThe Art Newspaperand the BBC. The Smithsonian, a U. S. research institution, returned 29 bronzes in October 2022. Belgium adopted a law that same year governing its Congolese collections. Switzerland returned 18 bronzes in June 2026, and Cambridge pledged in February of that year to return 116. As for the Djidji Ayôkwè, a law adopted on July 16, 2025, authorized its return. On Feb. 20, 2026, the French and Ivorian culture ministers signed the deed transferring ownership. After 110 years of silence, the talking drum crossed the sea once more, this time to return to its people. It would nevertheless be naive to mistake a break in the clouds for clear skies. Those invested in forgetting have not given up. The most stubborn obstacle is legal: the British Museum Act of 1963, which prevents the London museum from disposing of its collections. The doctrine of the “universal museum” is still invoked, along with the strange conviction that a people’s memory is somehow better preserved by those who took it from them. In France, for years, every restitution required its own special law, an exception to the sacrosanct principle of inalienability. The Sarr-Savoy report, meanwhile, faced criticism of its methodology even in the French Senate. Above all, a profound asymmetry remains. As long as those who possess these objects decide what to return 26 objects here and a sword there, out of tens of thousands of treasures they still decide what Africa will be allowed to remember. That is why the coming years matter on two fronts. France has begun work on a framework law submitted to the Senate on July 30, 2025, intended to replace the case-by-case legislative approach with a general procedure. The shift from discretionary goodwill to a recognized right would be profound. But the essential work will take place in the Global South. Africa must take the lead in reclaiming its own memory. It must draw up its own lists of what it is demanding, as Côte d’Ivoire did with the 148 objects it requested as early as 2018. It must build museums, train conservators, digitize inventories and prepare, as the Republic of Benin has done, the places where that memory can once again live. Restitution is not an end. It is a door. What begins afterward is the work of building a new relationship. Légende: Plaques Constituting the Benin BronzesIn Abidjan, the Djidji Ayôkwè has returned to its people. A talking drum is not merely something to be seen or preserved in a museum. Back on its own soil, it summons, gathers and becomes a form of sonic memory. It is the most fitting of symbols. By reclaiming these works one by one, Africa is not merely recovering treasures. It is reconnecting the severed thread between generations, restoring material proof to the stories told by elders and returning an inheritance to the young. Paulin Joachim, who died in 2012, did not live to see his cry answered. But if we know how to finish what he began, others may yet hear the answer he never did, on the day when, on shores across the continent, memory beats again like a drum that should never have been silenced. Servan Ahougnon